Reviews
Veronica Lee
Sandra Bullock is on terrific form in this rollicking romcom in which she plays Loretta Sage, a historian who writes bestselling romance novels in which the heroine has adventures in exotic places with her lover, Dash. Now, still grieving the loss of her archeologist husband five years before, Loretta has been sent on a book-signing tour by her manager, Beth (Da’Vine Joy Randolph, giving it both barrels).Bad enough for Loretta that she has to leave her apartment where she could happily stay for ever, but she has to go on the road with Alan (Channing Tatum), the chisel-jawed, hunky model who Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
With its wild, windswept seascape and cliff-top settlement, the first scene of The Northman, Robert Eggers’s first big-budget movie (around $90 million in the making), harks back, a little, to The Lighthouse (2019), a one-of-a-kind black and white marvel with only two protagonists. (Cinematographer Jarin Blatschke has worked on all Eggers’s films, including his first, The Witch, as has costume designer Linda Muir).But similarities end there, and if you wince occasionally at the violence in The Lighthouse, which includes being buried alive, attacks by a deranged supernatural seagull and Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Paul Verhoeven’s latest provocation is an old-fashioned but vigorous 17th century lesbian nun shocker, based on eye-poppingly explicit testimonies at the Christian church’s sole lesbian trial. It’s his most sustained examination of faith and sex, a theme going back to the repressive Calvinist father and sexually anarchic teens of his wild Dutch hit, Spetters (1980).Benedetta (Virginie Efira) has been imbued with a sense of religious destiny since childhood. Accepted into a Tuscan convent under stern but worldly Abbess Felicia (Charlotte Rampling), confusing, erotically charged dreams of Jesus Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Ché Walker claims he wrote Wolf Cub, now in the Hampstead Downstairs studio space, in a two-day blitz prompted by Donald Trump’s election win in 2016. He was working in Atlanta at the time, the home city of Claire Latham, the solo performer for this piece. With Walker directing and the twice Olivier-winning actor Sheila Atim, no less, providing evocative incidental music, they have created a haunting 80-minute monologue that embraces epic events.The locus of the spasm the US was experiencing when Walker sat down to write Wolf Cub is traced back to Ronald Reagan’s two-term Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
Jane Austen’s waspish vision revealed the vanities, delusions and cynical financial calculations that underpinned most of the relationships of her day. The element in which she thrived was repression; the heart constrained beneath the corset, the raging passion held firmly in place by that most important part of an Englishman’s anatomy, the stiff upper lip.This production – which opened to acclaim at the Manchester Exchange in 2017 – rips off the corsets and liberates the lips so that the vibrant, sometimes even violent subtext is revealed. In place of Austen’s assiduous filleting of Read more ...
Hannah Hutchings-Georgiou
To read Scholastique Mukasonga’s memoir, The Barefoot Woman, beautifully translated from the French by Jordan Stump, is to see simultaneously through the eyes of a woman and a child.The mother, the industrious and ingenious Stefania, watches her children attentively, preparing them for any possible danger that might assail them in or out of the home. Her daughter, the young Mukasonga, is the faithful storyteller of her mama’s one-time magical griot, whose loving and ever-watchful gaze, much like her narrative, never strays from the resilient and resourceful mother before her. Their entwined Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
“Play something we can dance to,” heckles a fan. “Fuck off, we are not a dance band,” fires back Wayne Hussey, leader of The Mission. He’s right. They’re not. But still there is dancing.One especially notable aspect of this gig is the total and vocal devotion of The Mission’s fans. Not only do they sing along loudly, en masse, to most songs, but they have their own football-style chants, sometimes making reference to Mission arcana beyond this writer’s knowledge. The band play the gig straight and sturdy, without banter, but the crowd lifts it.In terms of show, then, there are no bells’n’ Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Stories of Japanese soldiers who spent years in the tropical jungles long after the end of World War Two have always felt more like metaphorical illustrations of the lunacy of war than actual historical fact. Yet some of them were true, most notably that of Hiroo Onoda.Paris-born director Arthur Harari’s film traces Onoda’s story from his attempts in 1944 to qualify as a pilot – his trainers failed him because of his fear of heights, though they did offer him the consolation prize of becoming a kamikaze pilot – to his recruitment to a secretive unit specialising in undercover operations. As Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Murina, the suspenseful first feature written and directed by the Croatian filmmaker Antoneta Alamat Kusijanoviće, depicts a cruel dance that three of the four participants can't or won't stop. Its instigator, a father and husband in thrall to his ruinous machismo, is clueless. The steps – based on love, desire, avarice, jealousy, manipulation and anger – make for a discomfiting coming-of-age drama that won the Camera d’Or at Cannes last year.Filtered through the subjectivity of 17-year-old Julija (Gracija Filipović), as mettlesome as she is callow, this benighted waltz involves her tortured Read more ...
Ian Julier
The last of this season’s Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra concert series Voices from the East featured music from Azerbaijan with Kirill Karabits focusing on works by the contemporary composer Franghiz Ali-Zadeh and her teacher Kara Karayev.Born in Baku in 1918, Karayev spent hard times in Moscow in 1942-46 as a student of Shostakovich before returning to his homeland to become one of its most distinguished composers. Although he died in 1982, he remains renowned there and in the countries of the former Soviet Union for opera, ballet and symphonic works as well as ensemble, instrumental and Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Into the BBC One Sunday slot just vacated by Tommy Shelby of the Peaky Blinders returns Suranne Jones’s Anne Lister, another costume-drama maverick with striking headgear, definite leadership qualities and a way with a pistol. “They’re all a bit scared of you,” her younger sister Marian (Gemma Whelan) tries to explain to her after she has given an insubordinate servant 20 minutes to pack up and leave. “Why?” demands Anne, uncomprehendingly, as she loads her gun.This second series from Sally Wainwright arrives with even more of a swagger than the first. Inevitably, tossing the grenade of Anne Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
Megalomania is inherently theatrical. So it feels like it was only a matter of time before Donald Trump took to the boards, blasting the assembled crowd with his tangerine paranoia and clownish nihilism. What was less predictable was the turbo-charged brilliance of his reincarnation by Bertie Carvel, whose pitch-perfect observation of every physical tic is underscored by the understanding of Trump’s primal need to reduce everything around him to its basest physical state. Whether it’s the alpha-male gorilla waggle of his buttocks while playing golf or his putrid inability to value any woman Read more ...